Pro^GE’s APPROACH TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project Management is the process used to drive a project to its goal and targets, by
developing and operating a plan to manage the natural, human, financial and
technical resources, combined with the time aspect, and using this plan in the
design, application, coordination and the control phases of the project.

In the construction sector, Project Management requires multiple actors to work in
an effective team spirit, to achieve diverse, differentiated, clearly defined and
interdependent tasks, in a planned and coordinated manner, towards multiple
common targets.

These multiple actors are:

• Investment Institutions,

• Financial Institutions,

• Designers,

• Contractors,

• Suppliers,

• Operators or Administrators, and

• • Project Managers.

Three fundamental elements form the backbone of the Project Management concept, which emerged in the construction industry during the second half of the 21st century, as a necessity from the global changes; these are:

• Cost,

• Time, and

• Quality

Project Management Services must be built on these 3 fundamental elements.

In reality, the “completion time” and the “cost” elements are guesses in the early stages of a project, in a period where information about the project is most scarce. As time goes by and theses guesses become more certain, they also become some of
the most important goals of the project.

On the other hand, “quality” is an element that results from the work of a large number of actors, who play roles in the design and application phases of the project, who not only have diverse expertise and knowledge levels, or behavioral differences,
but who’s expertise and knowledge levels as well as behaviors may change over the course of the project’s lifecycle.

The combination of all of these factors made project management more inclusive in nature, and increased the importance of concepts like: “governance”, “proactive approach”, “risk management”, “human orientation”, “communication
management”, “occupational health and safety management”, “sustainability”, “environmental health”, or “recycling”. Furthermore, the gains in performance in these areas, started to define both the project’s success and the involved firms’
competitiveness.

There are different “schools” in project management, different approaches based on knowledge, and methods and skills pointed out by each one. The goals as well as the
cause and effect relations brought forward by these schools are different and contradictory to one another. Nevertheless, in practice, we can observe that most
managers select and use, one or many of these approaches, depending on the situation they face. Because the project environment is so complex and uncertain in
nature, it is evident that managers must use the methods and tools at their hand in a flexible manner. The need for managers to have as many and as various tools at their
fingertips as possible and to have these regularly updated in order to close the gap in the knowledge and skills causality, is a commonly accepted recommendation in the
profession. However, in practice, these choices are made through the rule of thumb, resulting in the choices and strategies being limited to personal experiences and not
feeding the corporate knowledgebase. Pro^GE aims to close this gap, and proposes its own approach by analyzing its own experiences, in other words by establishing the “Pro^GE School”.

Nowadays, the project manager not only needs to manage today’s processes, in accordance to the agreements signed with the multiple stakeholders, based on his past experience, expertise and skills, but he/she is also the one person who needs to foresee what may happen in the future and take the necessary steps proactively.

This is why in project management, foresight and risk management became two very important skills. In addition, in every step of the process, human factor and communication hold the most important spot. It is impossible to succeed while dismissing these. For all these reasons, the sub-processes below are key elements in